Two contemporary intellectuals, Luce Irigaray (b. 1932) and Georges Batailles (1897-1962), are influential in my approach to music and sexuality. Luce Irigaray, a second-wave feminist, linguist, and philosopher, challenges the symbolic order of language, which is fundamentally male in structure and symbolism (Lacan, Freud), and she urges a creation of l’écriture féminine, a truly female linguistic, free from the male appropriation of verbal expression. Through music with my band Twilight Language, with Joshua Slusher, I intend on exploring the essence of feminine expression through the musical delirium of vocal sound, devoid of linguistic logic, for a more primal communication that supercedes the Babylon of words, in hopes of touching on what is essentially female in me and unrestricted by masculine linguistic form. Irigaray’s ideas on female goddess-worship and witchcraft, as the female expression of divinity, separate from and repressed by male-dominated Christianity, also informs my interest in “mysticism,” as the female language of the Universal unknown. Finally, in this blog entry, I intend on touching upon Georges Bataille’s theories on the nature of eroticism, as a transgression of interdiction that reaches its zenith in the (regulated) shattering of taboos. My understanding of and approach to BDSM sex work has its foundation in the desire to grasp human sexual identity and psychology through erotic transgression, the act of which defines through opposition the formal structure of patriarchal civilization that gets broken in the process. I will explain how I intend on applying this understanding to my newest project with Todd Pendu, an avant garde/Surrealist pornographic film.
Luce Irigaray is a linguist and psychoanalyst whose work centers upon the study of schizophrenic “ideolect,” verbal expression that does not follow the rules of formal language. By studying the linguistic structures of the words of schizophrenics, words which seem devoid of logic, Irigaray seeks to find essential human patterns in language. She honors delirium, as Surrealists honor madness, as the key to understanding atavistic human psychology predating the structures of civilization. Irigaray builds upon the theories of Lacan, who wrote that the symbolic order of language is fundamentally masculine and patriarchal, particularly in our languages of law, economics, mythology, and history. She also builds upon the ideas of Freud, who wrote that the phallus/penis is the “signifier of signification” and the keystone to all linguistic structures. Like the film critic Laura Mulvey, who wrote that the film medium is appropriated by a visual and symbolic language that is essentially defined by a “male gaze,” objectifying female characters to serve a male heroic narrative, Irigaray also challenges women to create a new language, a new gaze, that is essentially independent from male verbal and visual expression. She believes that this l’écriture féminine, would find its truest expression in modes of delirium, which she writes has the potential for providing the basis of a woman’s language.
However, by defining her ideas in opposition to the works of male intellectuals, using their defined terms and their symbolic language, Irigaray falls into the same trap of masculine linguistics. Her dilemma is the fundamental dilemma of Second Wave feminism, which seeks to transcend more than the social inequalities that women experience, but also transcend the deep-seated Patriarchal ideological structures that govern women’s understandings of themselves and society: Second Wave feminists desire more than equality for women through being socially or politically equal to men; they want an equally valued female way of being, essentially different from men, but they can only articulate this separateness through opposition to an existing male language and framework, thus complicating their dependency. The trouble with Irigaray’s argument is that if our language is fundamentally Patriarchal in structure, there is no way to transcend its limitations through philosophy, which requires language to communicate logic; by using Lacanian and Freudian arguments, Irigaray is allowing herself to be governed by the same logic she seeks to subvert.
I believe that the construction of an essentially female language, l’écriture féminine, lies not in philosophy but in music. I believe that noise vocalism, devoid of lyrics, transcending words, inspired and informed by musical delirium, communicating only with the texture, tonality, and rhythm of pure vocal sound, is the key to touching an atavistic tongue before Babylon. This is what I aim to do with many of my vocals with Twilight Language. I sing in six languages: English, Chinese, Spanish, French, Kakchiquel, and Tzutuhil (the latter two of which are Mayan indigenous languages); but I also want to make motions in sign language and sing pure noise, like a human beatbox/synthesizer, but without any intention of imitating a drum kit. I want to sing pure emotion and create my écriture féminine.
Furthermore, I strongly believe that by singing/writing/painting about the experience of the whore, I am freeing a repressed female voice that needs to emerge and be honored in order for Third Wave feminism to progress. Both the Madonna and the Whore are male understandings of female as object, servicing men’s domestic and sexual needs. Women’s social status as objects of dependent sex (monogamously married) or independent sex (promiscuous, economically self-sustaining), is one defined by a Patriarchal order of female valuation. (Please read my zine, The AnnaKissed ManiFiesta, for elaboration of this argument.) Sex workers are keenly aware of the dilemma of being trapped by the “male gaze,” the male language of social understanding and desirability. In order to survive, sex workers cater to male notions of what is or isn’t attractive, and play to their fantasies to seduce and gain income; they consciously and subjectively objectify themselves by appropriating a male language and gaze, a language and gaze that, paradoxically, already appropriates their sexuality and objectifies them. This double reversal of perception and power dynamics, which confuses subject-object relations, is the complex reality of self-understanding and conscious agency in sex work. I believe it is of utmost importance to the feminist movement that a sex worker expresses her or his experiences in authentic terms, devoid of Patriarchal social assumptions, and I believe that such expression is a crucial part of creating l’écriture féminine.
I am also fascinated by Irigaray’s take on mysticism, divine goddess worship, and witchcraft. These female-centric belief systems have always existed outside of Christianity and legitimized male-dominated religions. They have always suffered repression and persecution as “evil” and “strange” belief systems, though they are no more or less rational or superstitious as Bible stories. In fact, witchcraft and “pagan” Earth goddess creeds have offered a wealth of knowledge on nature and natural medicines that has always been marginalized and persecuted to destruction by those of the male-dominated theological, legal, and medical professions throughout history, which are threatened by female bodily self-understanding and understanding of the Earth. The Earth, like women, must be tamed and used for mankind’s purposes, not appreciated for its own worth. The female body is appropriated by male science and the female mind is drugged by male pharmaceuticals, just as the female sexuality is appropriated by Patriarchal marriage and whorehouses, and the Earth is “civilized,” exploited to the brink of destruction, or “sustainably developed” to serve mankind’s needs and whims. The realm of the unknown is called “religion” by male prophets and Kings, but the language of Universal spirituality as experienced by many women prophets, is called “witchcraft” and “mysticism,” and deemed strange and inherently evil. I see mysticism, witchcraft, ecospirituality, and goddess-worship as the l’écriture féminine of what men call religion, and I experience and analyze them for the purpose of discovering a twilight language of the female tongue.
George Bataille also writes about religion and its relationship to eroticism. I became interested in Bataille only recently, when Todd Pendu, the filmmaker who is creating the avant garde/Surrealist porno I will be acting in, “The Evocation of a Demon Lover,” recommended that I read Bataille’s The Eye to prepare myself for the aesthetic of our film project. I am fascinated by Bataille’s obsession with horror and obscenity in eroticism. Bataille wrote that horror is fundamental to art, as it creates “disequilibrium” to our “general economy of utilitarian materialism,” and it allows us to commune with something sacred. He defines sacredness as “a privileged moment of communal unity, a convulsive form of what is ordinarily stifled,” (Visions of Excess) and links it to eroticism, which is a “fundamental violation of the pure (sacred) self” and a “transgression of interdiction.” Through eroticism, human sexuality obtains its climax through the shattering of taboos, and this transgression in turn creates the foundational constructs of religion. The erotic impulse is the first thing to be appropriated and bound by religion, as can be seen in the story of Eve’s Original Sin in the Garden of Eden, thus eroticism is actually the foundation of sacredness rather than its antithesis. Anguish and horror are the contestations of the disruption of social structure and sacredness, yet these very transgressions define the boundaries of that which is shattered through the act of eroticism. In our post-Sexual-Revolution society, where people are increasingly desensitized by sex and eroticism, which have been casually co-opted by advertising and a consumerism of excess (“homogeneous expenditure without return”), the realm of transgression is pushed further and further into BDSM. I enjoy playing with these erotic taboos as an exploration of sacredness as delineated by anguish and horror, and as a means to commune with a transcendental psychology, a fundamental humanness, that has yet to be completely defined, dissected, medicalized, and advertised to the point of non-eroticism or bland sanctity. Paradoxically, the experience of sacredness is only reached by breaking sanctity, and I experiment with eroticism and BDSM to touch new levels of sacredness/communion.
In “The Evocation of a Demon Lover,” the protagonist Laylah recites a mantra or spell that unleashes a fantastical beast. This beast, or demon (evil by religious linguistics), is the embodiment of the transgression of interdiction, whose manifestation and penetration unleashes Laylah into the realm of the sacred. Its very existence is a struggle for the psyche of Laylah, the mind that is slowly and torturously unbound from formal erotic signifiers into a language all its own, an authentic linguistic of eroticism that I hope to make l’écriture féminine of sex.
